Marxists
Internet Archive has a page of links to Selected Works of Lenin, which
contains a number of other candidates for any collection of classics. There is
also Lenin’s 1909 book on philosophy, called “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism”. But for us, because space and time constrain us, we
will leave most of these titles aside for the purposes of this brief course of
“Classics”. The total number of documents authored by Lenin available on the
Marxists Internet Archive is 4170. They are listed and hyperlinked by date, and alphabetically.

After a few
years of attenuated bourgeois democracy, what confronted the RSDLP in 1914 was
an international intra-Imperialist struggle that suddenly metastasized into the
most terrible war that the world had ever seen. The split that it caused in the
Second International was more than a problem. It was a catastrophe for the
working-class movement. But even more than that, the phenomenon called
Imperialism was a problem for the world that has not yet, in 2012, gone away.

Lenin was
constantly studying. From 1896 to 1899 he studied prodigiously to produce the
large work called “The
Development of Capitalism in Russia”. In the first decade of the new
century he began to study philosophy intensively. Then he began to study
Imperialism.

In those days
the term “Imperialism” was not impossible for any bourgeois to utter, as is
practically the case today. The term was common in daily journalism. It was an
English liberal, J A Hobson, who wrote the first definitive book on the
subject, published in 1902 as “Imperialism, a study”.
This followed immediately after the Anglo-Boer War had come to an end. It was
the Anglo-Boer War that most clearly in
its beginning defined modern Imperialism, as a world system distinct from plain
colonialism. Here was a metropolitan power (Britain) demanding profits without
taking responsibilities, and securing its demand by force of arms. Lenin
deliberately used Hobson’s work and that of other bourgeois writers, as he
frankly admits:

“To enable the reader to obtain the most well-grounded idea
of imperialism, I deliberately tried to quote as extensively as possible bourgeois economists who have to
admit the particularly incontrovertible facts concerning the latest stage of
capitalist economy.”

In Chapter 7 of
“Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (download linked below) Lenin
“sums up”, in a highly compressed way, what capitalist Imperialism actually is.
In the first paragraph, among other things, he says:

“…the monopolies, which have grown
out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and
alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense
antagonisms, frictions and conflicts.”

Thus, Imperialism
is a system dominated by monopoly.

A little later
on Lenin writes: “… politically,
imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction.”

South Africa
has seen Imperialism in all its aspects, but especially in war. It was the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 that
announced Imperialism’s intentions to the world, as much as the Spanish-American War of 1898
did, or the defeat of the Khalifa Abdallahi's forces at Omdurman in Sudan by the British
under Kitchener in the same year.

Theodore Roosevelt (US President 1901-1909) and the “Great White Fleet”

The system of
state-monopoly capital and dominance of the mineral-energy complex over the
South African productive economy dates from that time. This system has never
been fundamentally changed, and it has never brought full employment. It has
failed, but to change it will require a new confrontation with Imperialism.

Imperialism is
a system of war. Lenin pours scorn on “Kautsky's
silly little fable about "peaceful" ultra-imperialism,” calling
it “the reactionary attempt of a
frightened philistine to hide from stern reality.”

Lenin
concludes:

“The question is: what means other
than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the
development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one
side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital
on the other?”

The age of
Imperialism, for more than 112 years, has been an age of war, as Lenin
predicted it would be. From Lenin’s work to that of William Blum’s “Killing Hope”,
it is clear that Imperialism is an aggressive force which at some stage will
have to be confronted and defeated. One cannot hope to be exempt from this
confrontation forever. In Africa, Imperialism itself is forcing the
confrontation at an increasing speed.